"And someone above these posts was able to say, this is a minor change?

That's partially the reason why I posted that here I mean, none of that is "minor changes" and I would assume the devs have really tested each and every patch they made and/or applied to see that they bring out as stable and fast performance as possible. Even just the heavily-modified xcompmgr alone is quite a lot of work.

This certainly isn't just vanilla-Debian with the regular Steam-client on top of it. "

To add to the point as I mentioned earlier in this thread, that _amount_ of work cannot be done by just anyone else, it needs to have the expertise of Valve's software engineering to do the massive changes they've made to their OS. Their experience in game development is the biggest factor why they are able to do this.

So this is not something as another basement distro, for I'm tired of seeing linux-distros popping everywhere with the same features being touted again and again.
Regardless of Valve's success on this project, I am very excited for SteamOS, for this is a very different and unique Linux distribution.